Labour is out of ideas

Westminster might be waiting for the voters of Crewe and Nantwich to cast their ballots, but we have already learned one thing from the campaign: Labour’s policy cupboard is bare. That Labour’s hopes of hanging onto this normally safe seat rest solely on hoping for a sympathy vote for the daughter of the popular, recently deceased MP and on caricaturing the Tory candidate as a toff shows that no one in the Labour campaign team can think of a compelling, positive reason to vote for the party.

Martin Bright nails this point in his New Statesman column when he asks what would someone on the left see if they looked beyond Brown’s current political difficulties:
 

“The truth is that they would see a landscape largely barren of ideas. This is the true state of progressive opinion today. It is difficult to think of a single academic, writer or intellectual who is fully signed up to the Labour project as it exists in 2008.